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Like the English name quicksilver (' living-silver '), this name was due to mercury's liquid and shiny properties. [28] The modern English name mercury comes from the planet Mercury. In medieval alchemy, the seven known metals—quicksilver, gold, silver, copper, iron, lead, and tin—were associated with the seven planets.
Mercury is one of four terrestrial planets in the Solar System, which means it is a rocky body like Earth. It is the smallest planet in the Solar System, with an equatorial radius of 2,439.7 kilometres (1,516.0 mi). [4] Mercury is also smaller—albeit more massive—than the largest natural satellites in the Solar System, Ganymede and Titan.
Caravaggio is an example of a Peak ring impact basin on Mercury. Several areas on Mercury are extremely dark, such as a small crater within Hemingway crater in the lower right. The geology of Mercury is the scientific study of the surface, crust, and interior of the planet Mercury. It emphasizes the composition, structure, history, and physical ...
Before the discovery of its magnetic field in 1974, it was thought that because of Mercury's small size, its core had cooled over the years. There are still difficulties with this dynamo theory, including the fact that Mercury has a slow, 59-day-long rotation that could not have made it possible to generate a magnetic field.
Mercury's exospheric hydrogen and helium are believed to come from the Solar wind, while the oxygen is likely to be of crustal origin. [3] Ca and Mg in the tail. The fourth species detected in Mercury's exosphere was sodium (Na). It was discovered in 1985 by Drew Potter and Tom Morgan, who observed its Fraunhofer emission lines at 589 and 589.6 ...
With the discovery of a triple star system called PSR J0337+1715, located about 4,200 light-years from Earth, the strong equivalence principle can be tested with a high accuracy. This system contains a neutron star in a 1.6-day orbit with a white dwarf star, and the pair in a 327-day orbit with another white dwarf further away.
There are seven stable isotopes of mercury (80 Hg) with 202 Hg being the most abundant (29.86%). The longest-lived radioisotopes are 194 Hg with a half-life of 444 years, and 203 Hg with a half-life of 46.612 days. Most of the remaining 40 radioisotopes have half-lives that are less than a day.
Perey discovered it as a decay product of 227 Ac. [178] Francium was the last element to be discovered in nature, rather than synthesized in the lab, although four of the "synthetic" elements that were discovered later (plutonium, neptunium, astatine, and promethium) were eventually found in trace amounts in nature as well. [179]